Creature record / 1880
18 January 1880. Vellua village, about 50 km northwest of Turku. From a neighbouring house, two wolves were spotted crossing a potato field. They were carrying something. It was a boy, Karl Johan Hörnberg. For almost two years the farm country around Turku lived in fear. Parish records filled with the same words. "Äten af varg." Eaten by wolf. By the end, 22 children aged 2 to 10 were dead. Hunters, the army and Russian wolf trackers were called in. One drive at Marttila used 1,700 men. It killed no wolves. These were not phantoms. A mounted male and the pack's skulls survive, and science is still asking exactly what these animals were.
In the late 1870s, the countryside north and northeast of Turku was a landscape of small farms. Moose, the wolves' main prey, had been hunted out of southern Finland. Predators turned to livestock. In 1878 alone, they killed 12 pigs, 2,455 sheep, 472 cows and 158 horses in the Turku region. Children often moved through this landscape unsupervised.